A system that records the truth of what billions of people own cannot belong to a single company. It is a record of who owns what, where it came from, and whether it is real, across billions of products. Infrastructure that fundamental is not a product. It is a public layer.
If one company owns the record, it owns your ownership
If a single corporation owns that record, it owns your ownership. You end up renting proof of your own possessions from a company that can change the rules or disappear. Your title to the things you physically hold becomes a line item in someone else's database, revocable at their discretion. That is not ownership. It is permission.
The internet already solved this
We have seen how this is supposed to work. Email never belonged to one company. The web ran on TCP/IP. They are open standards that everyone builds on and no one owns. That is precisely why they became universal. Physical commerce never got that layer, so we built it.
An identity owned by the holder, readable by anyone
The Universal Goods Protocol gives every physical product a verifiable identity on LUKSO, owned by the person who holds it, not by us. It is readable by anyone who needs the truth of a product: brands, third parties, and agents alike. The protocol handles the identity and the provenance. Ownership stays with the owner.
“The same open layer that lets a person truly own what they hold is the only layer an agent will ever trust.”
The only layer an agent will ever trust
This is the part that matters for what comes next. An autonomous agent cannot act on a record controlled by a counterparty with an incentive to shade the truth. It needs a neutral, open source of fact. The same layer that gives a person real ownership is the one an agent can rely on. For agents, that means they can:
- Verify a product is real and trace its full history across every owner and border.
- Confirm who owns it now, and transact with them directly.
- Settle with every stakeholder involved: the seller paid, the royalties paid.
The agents are arriving. Now they can see your products, and no company stands between them and the truth.
James Albarracin is the Founder & CEO of Family Labs, the company behind the Universal Goods Protocol, open infrastructure that tokenises physical products into programmable digital assets via EU-compliant Digital Product Passports.